Industry News

10/23/2012

Rocketship Discovery Prep is a boxy, two-story elementary school wedged between a building materials company and a storm-water spillway in a run-down Latino neighborhood off Highway 101 in San Jose, Calif. The Rocketship network now serves students who are nearly all poor and who mostly don't speak English.

Brookline-based Beaver Country Day School has been awarded a Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam grant of $10,000 to create an automated robotic vehicular independence system that can carry up to 50 pounds for wheelchair-bound individuals or those needing hands-free help to transport cargo. Called JARVIS, students will showcase their prototype at EurekaFest at MIT in June.

School principals are in the middle of a balancing act when it comes to security. They need to create a welcoming, supportive open environment for students, parents, and credible community visitors who have legitimate purposes in their buildings, while they also have to keep out individuals who potentially have "ill intentions," says Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a national consulting firm specializing in school security and emergency preparedness training, school security assessments and school and crisis counseling services.

eBOARDsolutions announces a major update to the eBOARD Evaluation module. The Evaluation module, created to help streamline and align leadership evaluations now accommodates a wider variety of leadership evaluation templates including complex models that include rubrics and multi-layer evaluations.

In honor of National Disability Awareness Month, Atomic Learning along with assistive technology partners Crick Software, PALM, and TextHELP are encouraging educators to take a pledge to provide accessible instruction to reach all learners.

Discovery Education and 3M have named 14-year-old Deepika Kurup from Nashua, N.H., winner of the 2012 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge for her innovative, cost effective, and sustainable water-purification system.

The Maine Education Association has dropped its lawsuit targeting a law requiring insurers, health maintenance organizations and other medical service organizations to provide information concerning a school unit’s insurance claims history.

Those considered popular in secondary school earned 2% more decades later than oddballs such as Napoleon Dynamite – a so-called popularity premium. So says a new analysis of data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which follows more than 10,000 people who graduated from the blackboard jungle in Wisconsin in 1957.

Boston school officials announced today that they intend to tap an education-management company to convert the Marshall Elementary School in Dorchester into a charter school next fall, under a proposal to boost student achievement at the academically struggling school.

The East Aurora School Board voted Friday to rescind a policy on transgender students passed just five days before. The policy aimed to protect transgender and gender-nonconforming students’ right to privacy, and would have asked teachers to respect students' pronoun and name choices.